‘We do not want your felicitations,’ said Mrs Bingham. ‘We have enough of them from others.’
‘Then I wish you both goodnight and you particularly, Mr Bingham as you leave the profession you have adorned for so long.’
‘GET OUT, sir,’ Mr Bingham shouted, the veins standing out on his forehead.
Mr Heine walked slowly to the door, seemed to wish to stop and say something else, but then changed his mind and the two left in the room heard the door being shut.
‘I think we should both go to bed, dear,’ said Mr Bingham, panting heavily.
‘Of course, dear,’ said his wife. She locked the door and said, ‘Will you put the lights out or shall I?’
‘You may put them out, dear,’ said Mr Bingham. When the lights had been switched off they stood for a while in the darkness, listening to the little noises of the night from which Mr Heine had so abruptly and outrageously come.
‘I can’t remember him. I don’t believe he was in the school at all,’ said Mrs Bingham decisively.
‘You are right, dear,’ said Mr Bingham who could make out the outline of his wife in the half-darkness. ‘You are quite right, dear.’
‘I have a good memory and I should know,’ said Mrs Bingham as they lay side by side in the bed. Mr Bingham heard the cry of the owl, throatily soft, and turned over and was soon fast asleep. His wife listened to his snoring, staring sightlessly at the objects and furniture of the bedroom which she had gathered with such persistence and passion over the years.
The Play
When he started teaching first Mark Mason was very enthusiastic, thinking that he could bring to the pupils gifts of the poetry of Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Keats. But it wasn’t going to be like that, at least not with Class 3g. 3g was a class of girls who, before the raising of the school-leaving age, were to leave at the end of their fifteenth year. Mark brought them ‘relevant’ poems and novels including Timothy Winters and Jane Eyre but quickly discovered that they had a fixed antipathy to the written word. It was not that they were undisciplined – that is to say they were not actively mischievous – but they were thrawn: he felt that there was a solid wall between himself and them and that no matter how hard he sold them Jane Eyre, by reading chapters of it aloud, and comparing for instance the food in the school refectory that Jane Eyre had to eat with that which they themselves got in their school canteen, they were not interested. Indeed one day when he was walking down one of the aisles between two rows of desks he asked one of the girls, whose name was Lorna and who was pasty-faced and blond, what was the last book she had read, and she replied,
‘Please, sir, I never read any books.’
This answer amazed him for he could not conceive of a world where one never read any books and he was the more determined to introduce them to the activity which had given himself so much pleasure. But the more enthusiastic he became, the more eloquent his words, the more they withdrew into themselves till finally he had to admit that he was completely failing with the class. As he was very conscientious this troubled him, and not even his success with the academic classes compensated for his obvious lack of success with this particular class. He believed in any event that failure with the non-academic classes constituted failure as a teacher. He tried to do creative writing with them first by bringing in reproductions of paintings by Magritte which were intended to awaken in their minds a glimmer of the unexpectedness and strangeness of ordinary things, but they would simply look at them and point out to him their lack of resemblance to reality. He was in despair. His failure began to obsess him so much that he discussed the problem with the Head of Department who happened to be teaching Rasselas to the Sixth Form at the time with what success Mark could not gauge.
‘I suggest you make them do the work,’ said his Head of Department. ‘There comes a point where if you do not impose your personality they will take advantage of you.’
But somehow or another Mark could not impose his personality on them: they had a habit for instance of forcing him to deviate from the text he was studying with them by mentioning something that had appeared in the newspaper.
‘Sir,’ they would say, ‘did you see in the papers that there were two babies born from two wombs in the one woman.’ Mark would flush angrily and say, ‘I don’t see what this has to do with our work,’ but before he knew where he was he was in the middle of an animated discussion which was proceeding all around him about the anatomical significance of this piece of news. The fact was that he did not know how to deal with them: if they had been boys he might have threatened them with the last sanction of the belt, or at least frightened them in some way. But girls were different, one couldn’t belt girls, and certainly he couldn’t frighten this particular lot. They all wanted to be hairdressers: and one wanted to be an engineer having read in a paper that this was now a possible job for girls. He couldn’t find it in his heart to tell her that it was highly unlikely that she could do this without Highers. They fantasised a great deal about jobs and chose ones which were well beyond their scope. It seemed to him that his years in Training College hadn’t prepared him for this varied apathy and animated gossip. Sometimes one or two of them were absent and when he asked where
